Following their inception in January, BRC-20 tokens surpassed $4 billion in market capitalization, signifying a dramatic recovery within the Bitcoin ecosystem.
A research report dated December 15 from online cryptocurrency exchange Bitget states that the revenue from Bitcoin miners through on-chain fees has experienced a substantial increase from 1.7% in August to 19.57% by November.
November saw a significant increase in daily mining revenue from block rewards, surpassing $40 million. Year-to-date, the namesake digital asset has gained 161%.
Since their inception in January by Bitcoin developer Casey Rodarmor, BRC-20 tokens have become one of the most significant technological developments in a blockchain that is 15 years old.
Bitcoin Ordinals is a numbering system that enables monitoring and transfer by assigning a unique number to each Satoshi, or 1/100 millionth of a Bitcoin. On the Bitcoin blockchain, users can mint unique digital assets in conjunction with the inscription process, which adds a layer of data to each Satoshi.
With a current market capitalization of $1.34 billion, the Ordinals (ORDI) token was the first memecoin developed using the BRC-20 standard but is unrelated to the Ordinals protocol.
In the interim, scholars have additionally observed the addition of value to the Bitcoin ecosystem through the emergence of additional Bitcoin token standards, including ARC-20 from Atomicals Protocol:
“Unlike Ordinals, which rely on third-party sorters to order asset transactions, the Atomicals protocol’s ARC-20 standard uses Bitcoin’s smallest unit, Satoshi, as the smallest unit for issuing assets. This allows Atomicals assets to trace a complete transfer history without relying on any third-party sorter.”
Currently, Atomical Protocol comprises ARC-20 tokens, which are nonfungible tokens, realms, which are Bitcoin domain names, and Collection Containers, which are on-chain data object storage entities.
“The Atomics Protocol has witnessed the minting of 366,879 items, with a cumulative value of 55.8 BTC ($2.4 million). Researchers wrote, “The total number of mints on this protocol represents 2.69% of the total on Ordinals.”
Notwithstanding the excessive gas charges, a robust community demand persists for the production of BRC-20 tokens. Researchers observed that the Sats (SATS) memecoin reached its maximum supply of 21,107,258 mints and 36,061 holders on September 24.
This is even though gas fees for SATS exceeded $15 million. In their 2024 predictions, researchers concluded, “[Layer-two solutions such as] the Lightning Network will serve as the largest technical foundation supporting the widespread adoption of Bitcoin payments.”